The role of motivation and goal setting in cycling: How to set goals and stay motivated without burning out

Cycling is a sport that heavily rewards consistency with regular training as the cornerstone of any good training plan. Motivation is the underpinning element that is arguably the most important if you are looking to maximise your performance with everything else stemming from a place of motivation. 

Naturally, sometimes heading out for a ride will feel difficult or even not worth doing. Finding ways to motivate yourself can help keep you on track even when the weather or other factors in your life are making it tough to head out and turn the pedals. 

To find out exactly how to keep on top of your motivation and how best to set yourself goals that will light the fire within you, we caught up with professional coach Jacob Tipper. Having raced professionally himself, before coaching riders such as Ben Healy and Hannah Payton he has a unique perspective to shine some light on the intricate and often delicate subject of finding a healthy balance with motivation and goal setting. 

Why is having a goal to work towards important in cycling? 

Having a goal in mind whether that is to ride your local 30-mile loop at a certain average speed or to build up to your first race or a grand fondo is a great way to give each ride a purpose beyond itself. 

“It's giving you an excuse, to plan and have a bit of structure and stimulus beyond just wanting to ride hard on a Tuesday night to give yourself a good workout. It becomes that those Tuesday night hard rides are working towards something bigger.” Tipper explains. 

If each ride is viewed individually, it is harder to stick with it when you are tired or if the weather isn’t great. When you set yourself a goal you can clearly see how missing a week of riding or not committing to a session is going to have a knock-on effect either delaying you from reaching your goal or underperforming when it comes to an event. 

Tipper also explains that when people have a goal to work towards, “you really see the added motivation of people turning it on and suddenly starting to chase the process you can see that they seem to start enjoying it a bit more.” 

Cycling is a sport that at times is characterised by suffering and pushing yourself into uncomfortable places, if you do not have a good reason as to why you are doing this the motivation will only last so long before you no longer see the fun of going out and pushing your limits. 

SMART targets really are the best way to set your goals 

You have almost certainly come across the SMART acronym for goal setting, which is for good reason. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-sensitive. By setting your goals using this method it becomes easy to define a path from where you are to where you want to be. 

“As a coach I get people coming to me and saying their goal is to just be fitter.” These open-ended broad goals are very hard to achieve because there is no yardstick for what is exactly meant by ‘fitter’. Instead breaking the goal of being fitter down to something measurable gives you a performance metric to evaluate your riding against. 

Working out if you want to ride faster over a specific course, ride further, increase your power or complete a sportive will allow for a plan to be formed around it. The more specific you can be the easier it is to work towards as you can target exactly what needs to be done to improve in the right direction.  

For those newer to the sport, knowing what is achievable can be a tough ask as it is hard to know how you are going to progress. “This is where enlisting the help of a coach can be really beneficial to people.” Having an experienced pair of hands to help guide you through your goal-setting process is a great way to ensure that you don’t set lofty goals that are so far out of reach that they actually dim your motivation. 

It is a fine line to set a goal that will push you and present a challenge without being unrealistic. “You should have a direction to go in, and it's not always super important what that direction is. It's just good to know that you've got a direction rather than just aimlessly riding.” Not all goals have to be massive long-term goals, setting some smaller intermediate goals is a great way to keep you on track and to visibly show that you are making progress toward the bigger goal. 

Give yourself enough time to achieve your goals

It is easy to get motivated once you have a goal in mind and you want to immediately go out and chase it as quickly as possible. This is a surefire way to end up with both emotional and physical burnout, it is far better to take steady small steps to achieving a target rather than trying to force your body to adapt. 

“10 to 12 weeks gives you a chance to really have more of a plan. It depends on where your fitness is at. If you're not particularly fit and you're getting back into training then having some intermediate goals every three to four weeks will most likely show some change.” This can be great for motivation as you consistently see your ability increasing and it reaffirms that what you are doing is working. 

“If you are already highly trained and you're already doing as much as you can do with the time you have and the goal is to squeeze that last couple of per cent, then you're not going to see a couple of per cent change within three or four weeks. It will take you a bit longer to get there.” 

Setting goals in 10-12 week blocks gives your body time to adapt to the new training stimulus as well as go through a few periods of recovery to really let the training benefit take effect.

For particularly lofty ambitions it might be that you have a series of 12-week training blocks that are all gradually building to an ultimate goal. It is good to keep each block fairly short as otherwise it is easy to lose track of what you are working towards, for example, setting a goal for six months down the road will make it hard to stay on track and measure your progress without a series of intermediate goals. 

It is just as important to avoid over-doing it as it is to have a goal

Much like anything in life, there can be too much of a good thing and for those who find themselves hyper-motivated to achieve their goals, it can be easy to end up burning out. 

The key to avoiding burnout is being able to identify it as early as possible. One of the ways that Tipper monitors athletes that he coaches is simply to listen to the language they use when discussing training, if things start to sound more negative than before and there is generally less energy coming from the athlete this is an early tell that maybe things need to be switched up to prevent the rider from burning out. 

An increase in irritability is another indicator that you might need to take an easier week or mix in some cross-training to stave off burnout. If you find yourself getting easily frustrated about things that typically wouldn’t bother you, it might be time to assess your training load and how you are conducting your sessions. 

This is another place where a coach can offer tailored insights to help you train to your maximum potential without burning out. For riders who aren’t coached, enlisting a strategy of two or three weeks of structured training with a week of easier-intensity riding can help balance things. Another great method to prevent burnout is to add in some cross-training. If you find yourself struggling to get out on the road bike, swap out a few sessions for running, mountain biking, swimming or strength training. 

If you have lost motivation, it is important to first understand why 

If you have lost your drive to get out and go for a ride it might not be simply a case of lacking motivation for cycling in particular. Tipper explains that the first step in finding your motivation is to first understand why you are currently not as motivated as you once were. 

“Often there's sometimes an underlying reason rather than just the cycling.” The reality is that everything we do affects everything else so if other areas in your life are becoming more stressful, this has a knock-on effect on your mood and motivations. “The world's getting harder to live in, with the additional pressures and stress, more things are taking energy away from us, be it in traffic or social media or our jobs. It's giving people less and less energy to focus on other areas of life and to enjoy their hobbies so much.” 

If this is the case, then riding should be seen as an outlet rather than an additional stressor and heading out for some riders that have no focus other than feeding the soul can be exactly what you need at that time. 

Once other areas of your life calm down and free up some bandwidth, the best way to spark your motivation for riding is to find a challenge that genuinely excites you. These don’t have to be big grandiose goals but they can be to ride more miles than your friends each week or to ride up your local climb at a target speed or power. Having these small, achievable but also low-pressure goals will likely have you excited to head out and press on the pedals. 

The number one thing that Tipper believes is key to finding your motivation is to make sure that the goals you set and work towards are purely for yourself. If you are setting goals to impress other people or to try and be better than someone else it is very easy for the goal to lose its appeal. 

Data is great but it is only part of the equation 

There is no denying it, as a collective group, cyclists love to nerd out on data, whether that is the average speed and power of your last ride or if it is breaking down your local hill climb segment to see where you can squeeze out a little bit more speed. Tipper is the first to admit that for a lot of riders, this can be part of the fun and definitely shouldn’t be something to be concerned about doing. 

This does change, however, when riders begin to obsess about their power, weight or speed. It can become a dangerous path to associating your self-worth with your ability on the bike which, even for a professional rider, is not a healthy state of mind to be in. 

It is easy to get hung up on your speed or power from ride to ride but it is only part of the equation. Tipper makes the point that “people will now go for a ride and suddenly worry about the data whereas before they wouldn't have known, so they couldn't have worried and would have just finished the ride.” 

It is great to have and adds another level of specificity to your training but cycling is a complex equation that is more than just what the numbers on the screen say. It can be all too easy if you start to fixate on the data of each ride rather than other things that matter just as much. Something to never lose sight of is the enjoyment of each ride and discovering new roads under your own steam. 

Another important factor to remember when it comes to data analysis is that you are very seldom comparing like for like. If you have changed power meters then there will be some level of discrepancy between them. Equally, if you used to have 12 hours a week to train and now you can only commit five then comparing your performances is irrelevant. Instead, you should focus on being the best you can be given your current life setting.